What's With the MSM?by Patricia
Goldsmith
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 21, 2005

I
think it’s safe to say the mainstream media (MSM) are
having a
very hard time with the
Downing Street Memos (DSM). I know the corporate media are not our
friends, but I’m still stunned by the hostility the DSM seem to arouse in
(for want of a better word) journalists. It ranges from Frank Rich, one of
the good guys, who nevertheless needed to be told by Al Franken that
“conventional wisdom” aside, it still matters whether or not Bush lied
about taking the country to war. By the time Rich wrote his
latest New York Times column last Sunday, he had clearly
returned to consciousness, but his attitude is indicative of the air
reporters have to breathe, their unreal, hot-house reality.

No one
is immune to the mind-altering effects of our experiment in neural media
saturation, least of all the practitioners of the art of mass thought
control.

Take
Dana Milbank, a formerly sensible columnist who has frequently criticized
George Bush, but who has recently written a truly nasty piece of trash
ridiculing John Conyers’ DSM hearings as Democrats “playing house.”
Milbank’s column drips with malice, and every single slighting comment is
a reference to Democrats’ powerlessness, with words like “make-believe,”
“pretend”, and “mock”. Conyers was painted as a little toy chairman
pounding a plastic gavel, while a kangaroo court of witnesses and lots of
legislative wannabes cram themselves into a broom closet.

Gee, I
wonder is somebody’s feeling just an itsy bit powerless? Power. That’s
what matters to -- have to use the word again -- journalists.

Milbank’s history makes one hesitate to suggest payola or blackmail, but
then one never really knows what people’s personal circumstances really
are. Blackmail is a great favorite of “this gang,” as former Treasury
Secretary
Paul O’Neill referred to the Bush government. O’Neill famously
described himself as too old and too rich to be intimidated, but he
privately estimated that not many people had the resources to really cross
these people.

Then
too, nobody likes to hear “I told you so,” especially high-powered
corporate shills who are paid millions of dollars to tell us what to
think. They give the lectures, they don’t get lectured. Except. The Bush
administration has been exceptionally rough on big egos in the Fourth
Estate -- and on big careers. Over the last four years, the media has
changed, and I’m not talking about reporters or anchors or correspondents.
Those people are the sales reps of media corporations, which are run by
billionaire businessmen.

First,
kindly corporate parents pressed a patriotic press corps into active
government service following their emotional, 24/7, ratings-busting
coverage of September 11. High-priced management consultants (the smartest
guys in the room) declared that leftwing shows like Phil Donahue’s would
be an embarrassment in a time of war. Everyone holding a microphone wore a
lapel flag, delivering lots of coverage of nifty new weapons, and graphics
like bombs and fireworks. Over the months and years to come, the print
reporters got a rich diet of top-secret intelligence from high-level
administration sources that would speak only on background. This
information, generally presented in simple images -- from the aluminum
tubes mentioned in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, to the tube of
white powder Colin Powell held up so dramatically at the UN, to Condi Rice
and Dick Cheney’s smoking gun/mushroom cloud -- formed the basis for the
American people’s consent to war.

But here’s the beauty part: the MSM’s
reverent acceptance of absolute hogwash as the Gospel from on High became
blackmail material for Bush and his thugs. That’s art. Karl Rove is an
artist. He has succeeded so magnificently not because he understands the
American people, but because he knows media professionals better than they
know themselves.

What
Americans don’t see are the little games that are being played off-camera.
At the same time that Donald Rumsfeld, Scott McClellan, and George Bush
are rebuking Newsweek for gross irresponsibility in the most
Biblical terms, raining down hellfire and damnation, for example,
reporters aren’t able to forget that no one in that hyper-secretive,
hyper-vindictive administration will speak except on condition of
anonymity. Furthermore, when the administration has purposely leaked
material in the past -- and it leaks like a sieve -- they have punished
not the recipient of the leak (Bob Novak), but those who wouldn’t take the
bait (Judith Miller and the guy from Time, who might go to jail).
Poetry! Or at least poetic justice. Up is down, right is wrong, black is
white: to the extent that it deals with this administration, our media are
disoriented, dependent, poisoned.

And
let’s not forget Dan Rather hanging like a scarecrow on the information
highway to warn all the embedded, indebted careerists. The interesting
thing is that the commission appointed to look into his crimes, composed
of his most bitter rightwing detractors, ultimately couldn’t say for sure
whether the questionable documents were forged. But it doesn’t matter,
just like it won’t matter for Newsweek if material about US
personnel desecrating the Koran ultimately ends up in that government
report. The damage is done, move on -- that’s the Bush mantra, endlessly
repeated by his minions in the press. They can’t very well complain when
it’s applied to them.

Rather’s disgrace was so complete that sometime in October 2004, Sumner
Redstone, chairman of CBS’s parent company, Viacom, had to come out with
an announcement. The lifelong Massachusetts liberal had decided to vote
for George Bush. “Liberals are not bad people,” the charming Redstone
averred, “but Viacom needs Republicans values, like deregulation and so
forth.”

Robert
Redford appeared on the Al Franken Show this past week to talk
about the Deep Throat story. Yeah, it’s interesting, Redford said, but
people are missing the big picture. Nobody’s putting it together. It’s all
happening again, what happened during the McCarthy era and Watergate, the
stonewalling, the lying, the arrogance, all of it under George Bush here
and now.

Redford described a shift in his feelings about All the President’s Men.
On a political level, he’d always thought it was kind of a bonus that he
had helped inspire so many idealistic young people to become journalists.
The irony is that they had absorbed another lesson entirely. Turns out,
they wanted the fame and celebrity, not the hard work.

Laurie
Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who recently left Newsday
because its corporate culture is stifling true journalism, recently said
something similar on Democracy Now! She said when she asks her
students what they’re majoring in, they all say public relations, because
it’s the same as journalism, only more money.

The
truth of the matter is that our current MSM is roughly the third
generation of a progressively deregulated corporate culture, and they are
only intermittently able to tell the difference between ratings and the
truth. On the other hand, leftwing internet bloggers have been right again
and again. It’s not hard to understand the reason why, which is the exact
inverse of the MSM’s corruption. We’re not working for money. We don’t
have to answer to corporate bosses.

By
hunkering down and hardening their stance, the MSM are, at the very least,
placing their bets on the side of ever-increasing government repression.
And it is true that as democratic expression is forced through smaller and
smaller apertures, something’s got to give. Either expensively maintained
mass delusions will degrade, perhaps rapidly. Or there will be a
crackdown.

Patricia Goldsmith
is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy
watchdog group. She is also a frequent contributor to
MandateTHIS.org. She
can be reached at:
plgoldsmith@optonline.net.